Garlic is now the second best selling herbal supplement
after Echinacea in the United States. Add to that its culinary popularity and
you have one popular herb indeed. As garlic becomes increasingly popular, the
mountain of mixed reports and studies that look into its medicinal properties
continues to grow.

Garlic studies have become a favorite pastime for many
nutrition researchers making it one of the most examined herbs of all times.
Over 1200 medical and pharmacological reports as well as over 700 chemical
studies have been published over the years. With so much attention given to
this herb, one would think that scientists would have least separated the facts
about garlic from the myths, but the truth is that they have only begun to
scratch the outer dry filmy surface.

No one really knows exactly when modern garlic showed up on
your dinner tables. What we do know is that is has been cultivated and used by
people as both food and medicine since at leastbefore the age of the Pharaohs and even the Sumerians. Garlic has been
so extensively cultivated throughout the years that nothing like it really
exists in nature anymore.Most research
into the history of the plants leads us to believe that it started out as a
variant of the Lillie Family somewhere in Central Asia and then spread outward
towards the Mediterranean in the west in China in the east and then to India in
the South.

While the U.S.
medical
establishment does not like to categorize as something other than a
culinary,
other countries have been using raw garlic for medicinal purposes for
many
years.

How raw garlic helps

When you crush or chop up a
garlic clove you end up creating
two different sulfides: allicin sulfides and diallyl sulfides. These
sulfides
are what gives garlic most of its health benefits. Garlic that has been
roasted
whole might still contain some diallyl sulfides, but not any of the
much more
beneficial allicin compounds and is therefore not as potent in a
medicinal
sense.In fact,cooking crushed or chopped
garlic will also
degrade the allicin and putting it in a microwave will complete destroy
it.The best way to
use garlic is to
chop it or press it into some olive oil, leave it sit for 15 minutes,
and then
add it to your meal at the very end of cooking. The finer the garlic is
chopped, the more sulfides it will produce.

What can raw garlic cure?

Allicin Sulfide has antibiotic
properties that are better
than penicillin or tetracycline. It has the ability to kill bacteria
that has
become immune to other antibiotics because it interacts with the
specific
enzymes that the bacterium needs in order to thrive in the body.

Garlic also helps fight
infections and can stimulate your
immune system. It can kill off the microbes and bacteria that cause
many
ailments such as the common cold, whooping cough, tuberculosis,
botulism,
vaginal infections, bladder infections, gangrene, diarrhea, staph,
dysentery
and typhoid. In fact, during the First World War, garlic was used in
military
hospitals to help prevent the spread of gangrene and rubbing garlic on
an area
infected by staph will stop the infection in its tracks.

Garlic sulfides contain many
cancer preventing chemicals,
and studies have shown that raw garlic can help improve your
body’s ability to
fight cancer by almost two fold.Garlic
is
also an effective anti coagulant which can help the keep you blood from
forming
dangerous clots and can even enhance your ability to dissolve these
clots.
Garlic also contains high levels of selenium, which can help fight
tumor
growth. Garlic might even help your body rid itself of heavy metals.

The diallyl sulfides found in
garlic can help your immune
system, reduce your cholesterol and lower your blood pressure. Diallyl
sulfides
can also help reduce unhealthy triglycerides. Raw garlic can also act
as a
powerful antioxidant, reversing the damage done to your cells by those
cancer
causing free radicals. Garlic’s passage clearing pungency can
also provide
relief to those who suffer from chronic bronchitis.

A Doctor's Opinion

“Garlic is a veritable pharmacopeia. That’s why garlic has
been found in every medical book of every culture ever. For thousands of years,
garlic has been used for the treatment and prevention of disease. So there has
to be something there.”